A Nation of Victims

The re-emergence of the issue of wartime suffering to the fore of German public discourse represents the greatest shift in German memory culture since the Historikerstreit of the 1980s. The (international) attention and debates triggered by, for example, W.G. Sebald's Luftkrieg und Literatur , Günter Grass's Im Krebsgang , Jörg Friedrich's Der Brand testify to a change in focus away from the victims of National Socialism to the traumatic experience of the perpetrator collective' and its legacies